Wanna trade for an American Airlines eVIP?

You probably shouldn’t. Or, if you do, be very careful about who you’re trading with. It seems that AA’s corporate security group decided this week that the reasonably open bartering of upgrade instruments on FlyerTalk is no longer tolerated. A number of members have reported account audits, forfeiture of instruments or other penalties based on past actions. In response to this apparent move by AA the trading of such instruments on FlyerTalk has been halted.

That whole idea of breaking the rules in small enough doses that no one will ever notice seems to have some holes in it, huh??

Of course, reading the details from some of the people who were audited and the way they were behaving I’m not all that surprised they got caught.

h/t: Teh Otter

UPDATE: Turns out the troubles are more significant than previously suggested. FlyerTalk is taking the entire Coupon Connection portion of the site offline:

It is a shame in that so many have used and abused the spirit of the forum for so long; this probably should’ve been done long ago.

Flyertalk is a much less interesting place since all the people there for nerdy sex hookups aged into their late 30s and 40s and settled down, and were replaced by people churning credit cards and Vanilla reloads.